/vr/ - Retro Games

Played it on Dreamcast and bought a GC just to play the expansion and the sequel. Worth every penny and everyone I knew who played it could not get enough of it. Some of us still play regularly.

>>9471126
i don't have much more to add than what anon said here >>9471126

>>9471103
I would do anything for this game at the peak again right down to nol and lobby crashing and trade stealing.

I enjoyed it but I played Diablo II before I played PSO so PSO wasn't mindblowing or anything

>>9471126
Play it on what, private servers for the Gamecube?

>>9471346
anything that doesn't have anything to do with lee.

>>9471346
Yes, and on PC. You can play online on all platforms now, except Xbox iirc. But they may have figured that out now too.

>>9471103
I played it on xbox and it was packed. Unfortunately sega didn't give a damn and let us cheat constantly.

>>9471419
Insignia has it on xbox live now and it has crossplay with wii/gc possibly pc.

>>9471427
Eternal Christmas

>>9471431
Excellent. PSO will live forever, despite Sega's best efforts to destroy it over the years.

>>9471419
Isn't there a group of fellas that found a way to get the old Mechassault Servers up and running again with the DLC?

>>9471103
I never liked PSO because Phantasy Star became souless asf after Algol. PSO2 is literally disgusting.

>>9471103
They don't fucking make them like this anymore. FF14 and WoW are dog shit

>>9471747
As a big fan of IV before PSO came out, I was a little disappointed finding out it wasn't connected to Algo. But it was still amazing and I spent thousands of hours playing it (my first character was a HUmar named Chaz).

PSO is different, but it's still overloaded with soul. Couldn't get into PSO2, but I never gave it a fair shake. Got stuck with an early translation patch, gave up on progressing and never came back to it.

>>9471747
>>Algol

Wasn't that in the first game?

>>9471767
Ragol is the planet PSO takes place on. Sounds similar, but is unrelated.

>>9471782
*Algo is the star system that the original series takes place in

There's something about this game that just makes me so happy, every time I boot it up. From the character design, to the characters themselves. The world, the universe, the lore, the story, just everything.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pxDP6RI-DMI

The new one could have its strange orchestral soundtrack be written by Mick Gordon and Jeremy Soule and it just couldn't compare. What PSO made was a timecapsule of something great.

Holy shit this game is 20 years old. Are there any communities that are still active?

>>9471891
Ephinea never lacks for players

>>9471891
Dreamcast-Talk still has about 300-400 people on at any given time.

>>9471764
Can it still be played nowdays offline?

>>9471920
I believe so.

>>9471103
Big hype.
Good reviews.
Popular with older teens and college students.
Kids didn't take notice.

>>9471850
I bet they got merked by that boss. I killed it on my 20 force the other day and each hit was like 1/3rd my hp or more.

>>9472149
I'm stuck on De Rol Le, that foul worm dodges all my shots.

>>9472160
My solution was 10 mono and 10 difluids + Rafoie spam.

>>9472169
>Rafoie
Shit man, I'm a Robo-Dude. Can't use magic. I do got a nice big gun though.

>>9472178
Get a spread gun.

>>9471920
Yes, and online too. There are private servers for just about every version of PSO.

It's not as popular now as it used to be, but it's still alive. Every version has at least one private server.

Most populated servers for each version:
Dreamcast: Sylverant https://sylverant.net
Gamecube: Schthack https://schtserv.com
Xbox: Schthack https://schtserv.com
PC: Ephinea https://ephinea.pioneer2.net

Gamecube and Xbox are similar enough to crossplay, and they just got it working mere weeks ago. But Dreamcast and PC versions are too different from the others for crossplay to work.

PC is the most popular version these days, and in some ways the best one, as it's the only one with Episode 4.

If you want to play on a console, I'd recommend the Gamecube version on a Wii. Dreamcast is missing Episode 2. Getting ethernet hardware for either Dreamcast or Gamecube is expensive. Cheaper on an Xbox obviously, but that's still a little glitchy - I see Xbox players disconnecting a lot.

Wii is cheap and easy to hack (https://wii.guide), only requires a USB adapter for ethernet, which you can find for $10 on Ebay (although make sure you get the right one). Once you have that, the homebrew app Nintendont will load the game and emulate the Broadband Adapter.

>>9471103
It's still pretty popular now.

Is this still worth playing on Gamecube offline?

>>9472734
Very wholesome thank you. I’ll probably give it a play within the next year

>>9473260
It works offline, and there's a whole series of offline single-player quests to go through. But the game is primarily designed for team play. Gamecube supports splitscreen multiplayer offline, which is not bad.

>>9473260
Absolutely. Especially if you can get friends in on the splitscreen multiplayer. One of the things that impressed me most about PSO on GCN is that everyone can have their own characters on their own memory cards, and are completely independent. If you start a party with friends in FF Crystal Chronicles, your character is stuck in that party. In PSO though, you can play with one group of friends one day, and then take your memory card and use the same character with a completely different group of friends the next day. 4 players can play together with 4 different characters on 4 different memory cards, even though the gamecube only has 2 memory card ports.

One caveat though; the camera sucks in split screen. Don't jump straight into multiplayer with four level 1 characters. Everyone should play a bit of single player first to get used to playing the game before their screen gets shrunk down to one-quarter of the screen. And to get some money for restocking healing items.

>>9471192
How true is Diablo comparison?

>>9473410
PSO has slower combat against fewer enemies but it's broadly the same sort of genre of repeatedly clearing out the same areas for XP and loot

>>9473431
The combat in PSO, while simple, is more involved than just click-enemy-until-die.

>>9473410
Diablo 2 inspired PSO, which in turn inspired Monster Hunter.

>>9473447
They got released in the same year.

>>9473459
Maybe it was Diablo 1 then.

>>9473749
https://www.polygon.com/interviews/2020/8/2/21348946/phantasy-star-online-director-diablo-cut-features-christmas-nights
Yeah it was Diablo 1
>>9473443
This. I love Diablo 2 but PSO is more fun for me because of that.

>>9473758
Snippet:
>Interviewer: Obviously, Diablo was a big influence on PSO. How much of Diablo did you play yourself?
>I played quite a lot. Nobody on our team had worked on an online game, so one of the challenges was getting the team to understand what made online games fun. I had a lot of people play the game, but a lot of them were turned off by the dark fantasy. They would say, “it’s disturbing,” or, “I don’t get why it’s fun.” Trying to unify the team and getting them to understand the direction we wanted to take the game in was very difficult.

>Interviewer: Did you have LAN parties, where you played in a controlled environment so that the team could understand the cooperative elements?
>We installed Diablo on everyone’s PC in the office and had a closed LAN and spent many days playing together so that the team could learn what network gaming was all about.

>>9473764
>Interviewer: Was there a point where you saw people starting to get the appeal, like the satisfaction of seeing a rare item drop, where you felt the team really get into the game?
>Some people like Setsumasa stayed around until 10 or 11 p.m. at night after people left the office. He would connect Diablo to the network and play until morning, wake up to work, and then play again. Some of us weren’t going home much at the time. Some people would go home just to bathe, sleep a few hours, come back into the office to work, and then play Diablo at the office. It was mostly in the name of research, though. There are a number of games that we used as inspiration. Diablo was obviously one of them. I had heard that Dragon Quest was inspired by remaking Ultima with a Japanese audience in mind. So our concept was, “Let’s make a Diablo game that would appeal to the Japanese audience.”

>Interviewer: With good results. Even though Diablo is a distinctly American game, PSO feels like a very distinctly Japanese game. And yet, it’s not just palatable to Japanese gamers but to everyone.
>I think Diablo is an amazing game, but it’s not a game that appeals to Japanese players. Our suspicion was that Japanese gamers would prefer to cooperate and work together to defeat something more than to compete and fight against other players. That’s why we created PSO to be a cooperative role-playing game. Diablo has cooperative elements but it also has PK and an element of killing other player characters. We eliminated those elements and focused on how we could make a fun, cooperative RPG experience. I think that’s the biggest difference between PSO and Diablo.

I remember there was an MMO called Lineage which looked like Diablo. Wonder whether that had any influence. Never played it myself.

Can I play PSO online with my Wii?

>>9471103
Got my copy super cheap where I live.
Super happy.
What's de difference about the ver.2?

>>9473945
yes. use nintendont, enable BBA. you still need to register a SNAK for SCHTHACK but there are instructions on how to make or enter one.

>>9473758
Thanks for the article, will definitely give a read when my shift is over.
>>9473945
I didn't know until I read it in this very thread, but apparently, yes >>9472734

>>9471103
I miss mommy so much bros

>>9474174
i wonder what her corpse looks like right now

>>9471891
When you make a good game people will always play it if we have a way.

>>9474054
I skipped from Dreamcast Ver. 1 to Gamecube, so I don't know all of the differences, but the big ones are a new difficulty level (Ultimate) and an increase in the level cap from 100 to 200. Playing online on Gamecube, Ultimate difficulty is where you'll spend almost all of your time from Lv 80 onwards; one could argue that that's where the real game truly begins.

>>9471419
how can I play this online on PC?

>>9471850
Now that's a name i haven't seen in decades

poor man's ragnarok online

>>9474494
> Yet another typical timesink-laden multiplayer skinnerbox with boring point-click-and-watch combat
No.

>>9474527
>Yet another typical timesink-laden multiplayer skinnerbox with boring point-click-and-watch combat
that's called "PSO"

>>9474343
Read>>9472734

>>9473749
>>9473758
How popular Diablo was in Japan? I know the PS1 version exists.
FF7 also added a Diablo trivia for the Western Steam version only. Its a quite odd addition as they have included an trivia for an older release, only for the western version. I've heard Square liked Diablo in the past.

>>9473260
That was the only way I ever tried to play it, and this is probably a skill issue, I got close to the end but I never could figure out how to make meaningful progress or how any of the game systems work. It was just grinding, grinding, and very empty.

>>9473402
>>9473402
>One caveat though; the camera sucks in split screen. Don't jump straight into multiplayer with four level 1 characters. Everyone should play a bit of single player first to get used to playing the game before their screen gets shrunk down to one-quarter of the screen.
splitscreen works with the widescreen code
you can also patch the iso to change draw distance and other aspects

theres been no new content in almost 20 years. why do people still play this game?

>>9475062
fascinating RNG profiles and very interesting mags you can create. fucking addictive

I jump on ephenia every now and then. it's always such a comfortable time playing pso. the music and the graphics just transport me to places hardly any other games ever have.

Can any ol' computer run PSO, whats the population like on PC?

>>9475062
Its fun dude.

>>9475080
Ephinea has about 100-ish people online. The only catch is that 95% of them are over Lv100 and only play Ultimate difficulty, which you can't join until you are Lv80. Also lots of solo players in locked games by themselves too.

>>9471103
I imported it and did a bunch of moonrune sorcery on to get my hunters pass utilizing dialup internet just so I could play with rando nips
t. HUcast with Opa Opa mag and Chain Sawd equipped

>>9475094
And out of the open games, they're either
>ttf
>rt
>hbr quests
>the odd rando doing none of the above

unless it's event time. If you want to do any serious hunting when there are no events active, you'll either have to go solo or work with current HBRs (such as going for a high-hit Slicer of Fanatic if the current HBR has quests where you can get one fairly easily).

>>9475062
Because beneath all the RPG elements, the combat has an almost arcadey feel to it that you'd expect from sega, making it fun to play for the gameplay itself rather than just the long-term rewards of EXP and rare loot. There's a satisfying rythm to the combat.
The game doesn't waste your time making you do chores that don't involve combat. No fishing, mining, etc.
It's definitely repetitive, but that's because you spend most of your time doing the fun part; fighting baddies.
Beam down to planet, go through dungeun killing and looting everything, fight boss, beam up to ship, restock consumables, repeat. It's fun.
Then you have the social aspect on top of all that.

>>9475080
>Can any ol' computer run PSO,
Ephinea recently (or at least in the last year) updated their launcher (nessecary to connect to the server) making it not run on (my) Windows 7, which is pretty fucking lame considering the game itself should run on Windows 98. I'm personally very unimpressed that you now need to be a member of the Windows 10 cuck brigade to play a 22 year old game.

>>9475143
That's why I mostly play offline. I find the quests to be tedious compared to piping for rares and chilling with the boys.

>>9473410
Behind the scenes Diablo 1 and PSO are such similar games that if they played at all similarly PSO would be derided as extremely derivative.

However, PSO is also a competent action game in a way that Diablo 1 simply is not (and I say this as a person that loves both games). PSO gets away with being an only slightly more complicated version of the original Diablo under the hood by also being a third-person game that controls well and has a considerable learning curve.

>>9475476
>I find the quests to be tedious compared to piping for rares and chilling with the boys.
YES! I wish more people felt this way. Plus you can't join once a quest is underway, so the hop-in-hop-out nature of the game is disrupted by all the questing. If they could mod the game so you could join during quests, I think that would fix a lot of my gripes with the way people play the game these days.

Not completely related but I started playing PS02 Infinity on the PSP, with the English patch, and it's so much fucking fun. Dungeon crawling with a bajillion weapons to choose from and it looks great when upscaled. Definitely going to try this on PC!

Is the new MMO worth playing?

>>9475917
I didn't like it. It still has action-game gameplay, which is a plus, but it has the kind of free-to-play mechanics you find in shitty smartphone games.

>>9475143
ttf, rt and pod ruined Online
The entire point is to go through lengthy dungeon and be rewarded with the bossfight, which all those quests exactly eliminate.

>>9475979
That and the whole "endgame is the only thing that matters" mindset that a lot of online RPG gamers have these days. There's a popular opinion in many PSO communities that the game doesn't really start until Ultimate mode.

>>9476568
Fools
The game is literally when you get that first Dragon kill, when you get that upgrade from Saber to Brand, when your first Rifle drops, when you get that Foie LV3 and notice the fireball is slightly faster, it's the progression, and gameplay being so easy to pick up and play for anyone while still being very interactive and engrossing, not the mindless roomspam on Ultimate.
People don't understand the game they are playing.

>>9476610
The game starts when you boot it up. Thats where the fun begins.

>>9471103
I was one of the two (lel) people I knew who got a DC on launch in my city. The other guy got a broadband adapter and PSO straight away, him and his older brother were glued to it and spent many nights on it. Meanwhile I was getting my fix with Diablo 2 on PC. Did eventually jump in on PSO as well, maybe a year later, servers were full of life. People still play it to this date. I mean it's a simple game all things considered, but the atmosphere makes it mad chill. It's honestly just comfy and charming.

After seeing this thread I played some PSO on Ephinoa yesterday. Was really fun getting to chat with people and had some nice peeps (shout out to Team Golden!) show me around and help me get some early levels. Gameplay is very simplistic and you can tell this is a first in the series with the equipment limits, needing to constantly feed your MAG, etc, but the feeling of being in a small and tight-knit community is something I've not experienced before, doesn't happen in big MMOs like FFXIV for example.

>>9476568
To be fair, there's a massive difference between when you start Ultimate without a twinked-out character and when you're destroying Ultimate enemies with shit like sphered 50h Baranz Launchers and 80h Dark Flows.

>>9478267
FFXIV isn't really a game though it's a simple dress up sim for men who have issues with porn abuse.

>>9478939
I get that this is polemic bait, but I do enjoy the feeling of spell-casting in FFXIV. I never have the urge to play it for more than a month at a time so I'm nowhere near endgame content but I do enjoy the harder dungeons.

>>9478267
How do you get this game running? Do you need to use some kind of separate server like the Xbox XLink Kai service back in the day?

Do you need a Dreamcast to play online or can you play via emulator?

Asking cause I got an old gayming PC laying around and never tinkerered with Dreamcast emulation.

>>9479443
Ephinea is native PC. https://ephinea.pioneer2.net/

>>9479487
Neat thanks dude

>>9479427
I'm an XI fan and will never consider XIV to be a real game. SE moved away from a true mmo to that abomination to appease non gamers.

So, what is the deal with Phantasy Star Online Episode III?

>>9480504
They turned it into a card battler game because that was the craze at the time. Not exactly sure why.

>>9480504
i liked it a lot but nobody else really enjoyed it. i'll visit the online lobbies and no one is around but i figure they want me to join a fucking discord to join a scheduled match or some gay shit.

>>9480504
Besides the weird gameplay, I heard it hasn't been reverse engineered as completely as the other versions of PSO and playing it online barely works.

>>9480504
>>9481084
As much as I like the idea of a CCG without pay-to-win mechanics, I just couldn't get into the gameplay. Too much random chance. It's not just the randomness of the cards, but the game also uses dice rolls to determine how many resources you get on both your turn and your opponents turn. So, either build a deck around dice roll manipulation, or get fuckt.

>>9481801
i simply like cards. that's all it had to bring to me for me to get into it. is it my only card game? absolutely not. it isn't for everyone. you aren't stupid for not liking it.

>>9472734
Can you use a wiiu too?

>>9482020
Yes, the same homebrew you use to play on a Wii will work on a Wii U.

>>9471103
I didn't play it, but I grew up when it was a thing. It wasn't that popular. Ragnarok online, runescape, everquest, ultima online, and maple story are the main ones I can remember being a topic everywhere. Then star wars galaxies and dark age of camelot to some degree as well.

This game was sort of known to exist but no one really cared about it or talked about it.

>>9482507
And you still need the wii lan adapater?

>>9483180
If you want an Ethernet adapter, the same chipset that works on Wii works on Wii U, but you can just use Wi-Fi instead if you're lazy. He just brought it up to contrast how cheap and common the Wii's adapter is to how expensive the proprietary adapters for GameCube and Dreamcast are.

Who are or who were your characters, fellas?

Do you think we'll ever ge another game like PSO again? I don't think so. Its something from a bygone age.

>>9485907
No it isn't instant gratification.

I actively avoided this game because Phantasy Star should only be two-dimensional, like all good retro games.

>>9487414
you are mentally retarded

Just wanna say that Chaotic Bar is the best track in the game.

>>9484845
I made a maximum size robot with a tiny pistol and couldn't see in front of myself

>>9487414
>t.

>>9471103
I was pretty stupid when I first played PSO. I loved the aesthetics, the world was super cool, and teaming up with my friends to play together was great. I remember all of us getting set up on PC and when all of us were there, we played through either a space station (tutorial?) or the area shown here >>9471891 and it was a fun time until the leader of our party suggested we play the same dungeon again. Then again, and again. I recall we had played the same area for around 2 hours before I asked if we could move on, to which the party leader said we weren't really ready for the next area and that we'd need to go through a few more times. It was the first time I can remember experiencing grinding in a video game.

I remember playing on my own after, and making it easily through the next area, but I didn't have experience with these types of games, nor did I really get the whole dungeon-looting loop since I had mostly played linear games that didn't require grinding before that. I fell off, sadly, but I'll always appreciate the atmosphere this series set up with its cool designs, great music, etc. I gave PSU a shot when that came out, I think in a demo version, and it somehow landed with me more than PSO did at the time, but I think it's just simply because I wasn't as stupid with game genres anymore. Maybe I should try PSO again sometime.

>>9487414
Why can't it be 3D and 2D?

>>9488313
> remember all of us getting set up on PC and when all of us were there, we played through either a space station (tutorial?) or the area shown here and it was a fun time until the leader of our party suggested we play the same dungeon again. Then again, and again. I recall we had played the same area for around 2 hours before I asked if we could move on, to which the party leader said we weren't really ready for the next area and that we'd need to go through a few more times
Are you sure that wasn't PSU? that sounds like the PSU experience to me. There's no space station level in PSO, and nobody is eager to do Normal Forest over and over, which would require disbanding and forming a new party room each time.

>>9471103
For dreamcast?
The numbers might not be impressive to you if you're a zoomer but phantasy star online was fucking huge among dreamcast players with good internet in the late 90's and 00's, you ass.

I had a dreamcast and only ever played NFL 2K1 on it's internet. I also got big pictures of naked women on my TV using it's browser.

I didn't know about this shit until the dreamcast was cancelled. Get your Asian friends sooner rather than later.

>>9474894
Diablo was at least big with japanese online gaming devs. There's recent Final Fantasy XI interviews where they do round table discussions with a ton of other industry guys around the same time, including the PSO1's devs, and they all unanimously found at least some sort of inspiration to varying degrees. Not including this guy who was an outlier, most of them shared their experiences with the PSX port of all things.

>>9489714
Than you anon. While for some it's weird to look at Diable as a console game, PS1 port was actually good.

>>9489675
>There's no space station level in PSO
Maybe he means VR Spaceship?

>>9489675
>>9490785
Hmmm, that particular shot doesn't look familiar but it's been a really long time. It was certainly Phantasy Star Online, because I remember trying PSU later with a different group and enjoying it, and the forest area lines up with what I remember. I also remember that there was a glitch in the lobby that allowed you to move around while in a glowing energy chair your character spawns from emotes, and there were people running around playing as Sonic and Tails somehow, and their animations would break so hard when doing certain emotes.

>>9490861
The energy chair isn't a glitch, it's an intended feature. The Sonic and Tails stuff was probably people hacking the game to give themselves NPC models (Sonic, Tails, and Knuckles all exist as NPCs for events). The only other thing I can figure is you either thought Pioneer 2 was a normal level (it basically functions as the game's "town") or you thought the Mines were a space station.

>>9491370
Oh, neat! That might certainly be it; that screenshot is very familiar. I thought I remembered fighting enemies in an area like this.. was there ever a boss arena that looked like this?
Thanks for helping jog my memory by the way, I really love this game's style, even if I didn't gel with it the first time I tried. Did repeat messages in the lobbies get gigantic on the HUD in PSO as well, or was that just in PSU? I remember thinking it was hilarious seeing people screaming some garbage and the textbox getting huge.

Loved playing PSO but the "end-game" gear progression felt fucking weird. Your first time through you basically just use all the normal drops and upgrade to each new tier as they become available, maybe using a rare if you happen to get lucky, but shortly after reaching the point where "rare" drops start to become somewhat common it feels very poorly thought out. A majority of them are garbage and there are too many imbalanced items that last way too long simply because nothing else outside of getting an extremely lucky drop will replace it.

>>9493417
I don't think there was any thought about endgame back when the game was first made. Games like PSO and Diablo are more about the journey than the destination. Usually around the time I get to Ultimate mode, I start getting bored and either re-roll a new character or just stop playing for a while.

>>9493065
>was there ever a boss arena that looked like this?
You might be thinking of the mine (the third area in episode 1)

>>9484186
>If you want an Ethernet adapter, the same chipset that works on Wii works on Wii U, but you can just use Wi-Fi instead if you're lazy. He just brought it up to contrast how cheap and common the Wii's adapter is to how expensive the proprietary adapters for GameCube and Dreamcast are.
Oh, I mentioned the ethernet adapter because the Wii wifi doesn't seem to work with a lot of modern wifi routers. The Wii U wifi might work fine though, for all I know.
The other day, I actually did play this game using the Wii wifi using my phone as a hotspot (my main internet connection was down because a tree fell over somewhere in the neighborhood) and it worked pretty well. PSO seems to be very forgiving in terms of bandwidth and latency. I guess it has to be, as it was originally played over dialup.

>>9494954
>Oh, I mentioned the ethernet adapter because the Wii wifi doesn't seem to work with a lot of modern wifi routers. The Wii U wifi might work fine though, for all I know.
Ah, I remember that was a problem for me a long time ago. Now I just use one of my older routers with a hidden SSID and no security, since I'm not worried about someone competent trying to use my internet in bumfuck, and a hidden SSID is enough to filter dumb people looking for free Wi-Fi.

>>9471103
Why is the FOnewearl circled in your image?

I remember I really didn't like it at first in its day. I thought it was a simplified Diablo styled generated item gathering loop with less fluid combat that I was unimpressed with just based on watching it played solo at a friend's place. However so many of my friends were playing and they wanted me to play alongside them, so they gave me their Japanese copy (since they went online with the US version) since I couldn't afford the game. My friends even chipped in to buy the Dreamcast keyboard for me as a Christmas gift, as they couldn't stand the wait for me to d-pad type messages. The mechanics are simplistic, but then meeting so many and finding out others I knew outside my main circles of friends were playing, made it an amazing communal experience. Even met a few others through the game joining randoms and enjoyed the whole vibe of playing alongside others. The people playing were very friendly and even though the translations were all scuffed using the chat preset phrases, some very diverse teams were made on the fly. The music and visuals were fantastic and are embedded into my memories, so in the end I love the game more for the whole time with it than the game itself. Alas, it is an experience tied to the time it was out, and I am so glad I was there for it.

>>9496636
You know I had a reason for the circle but its been so long I don't remember anymore.

Good thread everybody, time to let it go.
See you all next time.